NOT FOR THE FAINT-HEARTED

Who was it who first said that growing old is not for the faint-hearted? The “not for sissies” version is attributed to Bette Davies, and there are other variations which basically suggest that it’s not for cowards, but I wonder whether the notion has been around for far longer than that. It is, after all, one of the essential truths of life and one which, if you’re lucky enough to survive long enough, tends to cross everyone’s mind eventually.

After all, when every telephone call can bring dreadful news of someone you know or someone you admire not making it, and every news broadcast can tell you of another much-loved iconic “immortal” slipping off this mortal coil, each and every day brings with it new fears, new terrors and new disappointments to have to cope with.

And that’s not even considering the night terrors when you start to believe that every louder than usual thump of your heart, or each strange new lump and bump you find, or every twinge or ache that shoots across your chest or your limbs, or every unusual visit to the bathroom, might just be the first indication of something which might eventually kill you, assuming of course that your failing eyesight and slower reflexes don’t lead you into a head-on collision on the roads, or that picking up one too many shopping bags doesn’t put that sudden fatal strain on your system because inside your mind you’re still a teenager, or that some actual teenager with a bloody great big knife takes a liking to the idea of taking your wallet from you.

My God! It’s terrifying!

I used to wonder why my mother and her friends used to sometimes appear to be so damned rude to each other, and talk to each other in such a curmudgeonly and irritated manner. They could be downright nasty to each other at times. I imagine that, at some point, you’ve overheard the impatient snapping in the car parks and supermarkets between a couple of oldsters, or had to listen to the bickering of supposed friends as they sit in the tea shop.

I thought it was just because you get to a certain age and you just don’t care what people think, but now I’m beginning to understand that it’s perhaps more born from fear and frustration and the sense that if you don’t gee somebody up they might just get left behind and that will mean another friend lost, and another trip to the crematorium, and another lonely silence at the end of a telephone number.

I wonder what would happen if we all came with a built-in self-destruct system that we had personal control over? Maybe a button buried deep inside the ear-hole or somesuch, one which only we could press and which only responded to our own touch to complete the circuit. How many of us would just push the thing and get it over with rather than waiting for the inevitable horrors which are beyond our own control? By just thinking a certain sequence and following it up with a quick digit to the lug-hole and “ZAP! THUD!” it would all be over and you’d have slipped into oblivion with a happy thought in your heart and your finger sticking in your ear.

Of course, there’s the tricky matter of not knowing the outcome of certain things, or not seeing the third part of that trilogy you’d been enjoying, but that, unfortunately, comes with the territory anyway. Also, in general, other people might not be ready for us to go yet, but then other people generally never are, and if you wait around forever waiting for everyone to get themselves sorted out and get their act together, you’ll find yourself snapping and bickering in the car park just like everyone else.

Granted, there would have to be safeguards put in place. Otherwise, well, there’d be an awful lot of us who wouldn’t make it through teenagerhood because of an unexpectedly spectacular zit, or a particularly horrendous rejection by the girl or boy of our dreams, but maybe the laws of evolution could have got around that by not having it activate until somewhere in your thirties, or whenever it is you finally realise that the universe doesn’t actually revolve around you, or by adding one of those “failsafe” messages like the ones which ought to be attached to “one-click” ordering and remind you that you’re actually purchasing a load of old tat: “Are you sure you want to buy ‘Richard Clayderman Plays The Beatles’…?”

Dear God! If it ever came to that, I’d have my fingers in my ears so fast…

DRAGGING IT OUT

Because I've got my finger on the pulse about all things youthful, I was watching TV Channel "E4" the other day just to scramble their advertising demographic and confuse their marketing people. Okay, that's not strictly true. I was watching it because I actually quite like "The Big Bang Theory" (The US Comedy Show which started off being about misfit science geeks but which seems to have transformed itself into something more hopeful), and still tune in to the repeats even though we've seen most of them a fair few times now.

Well, it keeps us occupied whilst we're reheating our evening meal, and, presumably, really annoys those people trying to position the channel squarely in the "Youth TV" market and who wish that the old folk would just go away. Not unlike, I imagine, that chap who runs Radio One seemed to imply a few months ago when he suggested that he didn't want us oldies listening to his "hip and happening" (you can tell how old I am...) radio station because he wanted to keep it special for him and his mates.

"S'not fair! You grown-ups spoil EVERYTHING! Buying the same clothes as us, using the same websites... Why don't you just GO AWAY to places where old people hang out...?"

This, incidentally, may be one reason why FizzBok is apparently losing users hand over fist, by the way... It's started to be perceived as a place your mum might go for a bit of a chat. I can still remember the mind-crashing tedium of having to go with my mum to the shops when I was a small person and having to listen to her drone on and on when she stopped to chat to someone she knew who she'd just happened to bump into...

"GOD!!!"

And FizzBok is just like that...

Anyway, the point that I was going to make was that I saw a trailer for a melodramatic TV series called "Revenge" which looks godawful, and not the sort of thing that I would ever waste my time with at all, but which was about to return for its third series, presumably because one lot of revenge is never quite enough.

Now I'm sure that, for its target audience, "Revenge" hits all of the right notes, and its plots are all suitably convoluted and soap-operatic, and that its plot reveals and cliffhangers are suitably astonishing. I'm also quite certain that the massively over-acted "evil voice" scenes played by impossibly glamorous young actors all reach just the right pitch of absurdity. I'm not going to criticise any TV show for successfully entertaining its audience no matter how stupid I might personally find it. 

After all, my generation had "Dynasty" and there was seldom anything logical about its plot development, and even that, apparently, was relatively sane when compared to some of the Daytime soaps...

But...

"Revenge" strikes me as being one of those rather strange shows where an exciting-sounding idea gets pitched and the pilot is made and a full season gets commissioned and, because of the fickle nature of American television, an entire story gets told across that season to a fairly satisfactory conclusion. Then it becomes moderately successful and, because the show doesn't get cancelled, someone has to then extrapolate further not dissimilar stories to the point of absurdity to stretch the idea into a second year and beyond.

It has to be similar because you have to keep giving the audience the thing which they quite liked and which drew them to the show in the first place. Equally, it has to be different enough to keep them guessing and coming back for more right up until the repetition and ridiculousness gets so far beyond absurdity that even the most die-hard fans are saying that it is no longer the series it once was.

Book series writers can struggle with the same problem, especially if they kill off a much-loved character far too soon, and before they realise quite how popular they've become. Also, perhaps another lesson to be learned here, is that it's probably best not to pick a title like say "Escape" from somewhere if you don't want to spend the rest of your writing life working on escape stories or trying to find reasons for your now much-loved characters to keep getting locked up...

Incidentally, like during the first year of "24", sometimes the story has to be wound up after only half a season so it can still be sold even if it gets cancelled, and then another story has to be kick-started by the first, in the whole "hedging your bets over possible failure" way which can stifle or stimulate American screenwriters in almost equal measure.

The whole thing gets resolved around about episode twelve, or, if renewed, twenty-two and then there just has to be a "shocking" reveal during the season finale which either shows that "all bets are off", is a "game-changer", or rather just proves that all of the efforts of the entire season were pretty pointless after all.

A similar problem is faced with a one-idea title like "Prison Break..." You spend an entire season achieving the breakout mentioned in the title, but what do you do once you've achieved that breakout and you've got another year to fill...?

But that, I suppose, is another story.

ANY OLD ACTORS

To people of my generation it's difficult to think of actors like Sir Ralph, Sir John or Sir Larry as anything other than "old". After all, he films that were around when I was young in which they were appearing showed us that they were old and coming to the end of long and glittering careers. We'd never seen them any other way than as old men and that's the image which fixed itself in our minds.

It didn't really matter to us that they'd had long an glittering careers, or that they might once have been as young and springy of step as our own generation of actors, they were just those old guys. We might have seen the odd photograph of them prancing about on stage back in the thirties, or mooning over some young starlet in the kinds of soppy-looking films we might catch our mums watching on damp Saturday afternoons, but we seldom made the connection between those bright young things and the ancient monuments with which we were familiar, and, even if we did, it was only to remark upon how silly they used to look, or to be overcome with the kind of "I don't believe it!" incredulity of youth that now appears to have found a massive new outlet in TwitWorld...

Our generation had proper action heroes like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Harrison Ford and Bruce Willis, not old geezers like them or those cowboys in the films that dad used watch. Young looking, vital, hard guys, dispensing violence with a merry quip on their lips and not being above jumping from a building or two with naught but an aesthetically positioned scratch to show for it.

"Young guys like Stallone and Schwarzenegger...?" I hear you youngsters at the back giggling...

Well, yes they were, then...

"How could he ever have been James Bond...? He's just so old...!"

Sorry Sean... Sorry Rog...

Just as Larry and Johnnie and Ralphie were in my parent's day...

Equally, our "contemporaries", the actors that were our own age, such as George Clooney and Brad Pitt, well, they were all being swooned over and fantasised about by people who didn't think that the likes of us mere mortals were good enough for them, and it's rather hard to think of them as getting old just like everyone else does.

I'm sure that teenagers nowadays whisper to each other about the crushes that their parents have on the Clooney and the Pitt and find it all rather gross and disgusting... if they're feeling up to a three syllable reaction, that is...

I suppose that we are old enough and lucky enough to have seen Harrison and Clint and Sean and Rog when they were young and fresh and in their prime, but it's easy to understand, really, how people's visions of just who the Movie Stars are change from generation to generation. After all, the actors that are already in the world when we arrive into it are already oldish and getting older by the day, the ones which arrive on the world stage when we're teenagers are just that little bit older than us, and the ones who are our own age when they achieve their success seem like young and talentless young whippersnappers to our mums and dads when compared to their own idea of what a living legend might be.

The other thing is that when my generation was growing up, our access to older performances was pretty much restricted to whatever happened to be on one of the three choices of TV channel we had. Our only exposure to Ralph and Larry and John was in the movies that they were making at the time, and it was a very rare thing for anything showing them off as youngsters to be shown on telly, unless they dredged up "Henry V" for some strangely patriotic or Bank Holiday related reason.

Perhap future generations will be luckier given that they have far wider access to old movies and performances than we once did and the youthful versions of their heroes and heroines will remain on constant rerun, whilst the respected real person is hopefully allowed to mellow nicely whilst retaining all of the respect and adoration... until the next generation grow up and declare them to be whatever their equivalent of "gross" might happen to be.

This is one of the reasons that these relatively new theatre initiatives like N.T. Live and its stablemates at the R.S.C. and the Opera remain so vital so that, unlike in previous eras, we will be able to preserve these great performances for future generations to enjoy and learn from, even when the fan-girls and squeeeee-merchants of today have got to the age where they can say things like "I remember when David Tennant were nowt but a nipper" and so forth.

Because, believe it or not, that day will come... and perhaps sooner than you think...

SUDDEN ONSET AGEING

This year has been brutal. I've now spent more than eight months of it trudging backwards and forwards between work, the hospital and home since the beginning of the second week of January and here we find ourselves already cutting deeply into October and still it goes on like a never-ending torment in my own particular circle of hell.

Reluctantly spending so much time in my mother's company has hardly been a joy, either, as I've never been a fan of being around decaying, failing bodies at the best of times, not least because it serves as a terrible reminder of my own mortality, but also because my mother's own raging against the dying of the light appears to involve lashing out at everyone else as if, just by being alive and comparatively healthy, somehow it must be their fault that she continues to suffer such indignities.

Which in some way it probably is.

If only I hadn't followed my artistic instincts but had instead gone into the world of high finance, or some other profession where gaining as much personal wealth as possible was the prime motivation, maybe I'd now have enough hard-leeched cash to let her see out the rest of her days in the luxurious, pampered surroundings that she so obviously believes that she ought to be living in.

Meanwhile, having been in so many of those Wards full of elderly people, I'm becoming utterly convinced that old age is catching.

It's an infection.

It's a disease.

Spend too much time in its company and it will seek you out and then it simply seeps into you, and gnaws away at you, chomping away at whatever youth and vitality that you've managed to hang on to and spitting it out, raw and festering and ghastly in its arbitrary, callous disregard for whatever you might have thought you had planned for yourself and your future.

Until this year, I thought that I'd been weathering rather well for a man of my great age. There was still a relatively full head of hair on the top of my head and the vast majority of it was still in the original specified colour. Any narcissistic moments spent in budgie-like perusal of my own face in the mirror would, occasionally, make me feel as if the ravages so far hadn't been too bad, and whilst the number of days when my self-confidence escapes me and I feel that I'm looking at a particularly unpleasing potato is still relatively high, the days when I felt good about my appearance did, at least, still occur every once in a while.

The fatigue I've been feeling seems only natural given the levels of depression and anxiety I've been suffering from recently as I've juggled this and that and tried to keep things going in the face of chaos and adversity.

But when ageing starts to happen, it happens really fast.

First the teeth started to ache more often than seemed usual, and the bleeding returned, possibly because I was grinding my teeth in the night, or perhaps because my diet of hastily grabbed pseudo-meals was not as healthy as once it was, or maybe it is just gum disease and the glass jar of acrylic molars is mere weeks away from me now.

Then, one morning, I had a tremendously painful back spasm which sent secondary pain shooting up and down my leg as if all the little demons which had been whispering in my mind had suddenly decided to have a "sexy-party" in my nervous system and start poking everything they could with their tiny tridents. This floored me for a day or two, only to ease off before returning with increasing frequency ever since. Usually, incidentally, whenever I go for a bit of a lie down...

As growing levels of exhaustion overwhelm me, I find that, more and more, I just want to walk away from it, wash my hands of it and for it to be done with.

To be over.

SUDDENLY OLD

I know that I’ve always had a slightly “old-fashioned” way of looking at the world. I realise that my points of view and opinions really don’t seem to fit all that well in this world in which we live, but I am prepared to admit that, to be perfectly honest, I don’t think that they ever have. The world to me has always been a strange and mysterious place, but I rather suspect that it always will. People, and by that I mean “people”, and their strange and, quite frankly bewildering ways of going about their lives, have always been a bit of a mystery to me and, quite frankly, in most cases, I could quite happily exist without a great many of them. I was always pretty convinced that I was “born forty” and somehow I imagine that I’ve just spent my entire life waiting for everyone else to “just grow up” although that seems to be something of an anathema to many people who share my generation, and many more in the one coming after it.

“Growing old gracefully” just seems to have become, like myself, a thing of the past.

However, over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve suddenly started to feel as if I’ve actually got old, as if the sands of time have started to run out, and the old man in the mirror who’s always been there is now actually an old man in the mirror. Still, as they say, getting older is far more preferable than the alternative, although some days I’m not exactly too sure about the validity of that argument..

“You’re getting to that age…”

The doctor’s said it, the practice nurse has said it, the optician’s said it, heck, even the beloved has said it. I’ve been known to mutter it at myself into the mirror from time to time.

I mean, the grey hairs and their “pepper and salt” effect which is now looking more like the slush after a snowfall (although I’m still preferring the grey over the pink option when it comes to my own dome), and the indelible lines carved into the face have been there for a while now, and I’ve been on that daily regime of pills for quite a few years now (which I always promised myself would never happen), but other things, other more worrying concerns have been creeping in lately, things that speak of the sharpening of scythes and a general slow descent into deterioration, degradation and woe.

You might think to look at that I’ve already been like this for a very long time and you might very well be right, but its just taken me personally much longer than everyone else to actually notice...

I’m not completely without any self-awareness, however. I have, in the past, already started to notice a few things about which I am less certain than I once was. My driving, for example, seems to be getting worse. Now I’m not quite in the “soft brimmed hat 10 m.p.h.” brigade yet, although some of the people stuck behind me might be forced to disagree with me on that, but I am rather less self assured than once I was about such things, and I have noticed a strange tendency to feel less confident than I once was behind the wheel and my concentration sometimes seems less focused than it used to be.

Recently the memory had started to play little tricks and, as well as that, the memory has started to play little tricks.

(Hah! Bleeding hah!)

I’ve also started noticing that increasing sense of vagueness and doubt about things that I was once so very sure about, and I seem to be getting more convinced that the world has somehow passed me by and that I’ve managed to rather “waste” my one shot at this “living” mullarkey on things that really, in the end, weren’t all that important.

Then I’ve noticed a creeping sense of nostalgia affecting many of the things I do. I’m not quite yet at the “in my day” stage, but I really can’t imagine that it’s that far away.

Oddly enough, there’s also been a growing sense of what I can only really refer to as “the fear”, and that’s the most surprising thing of all. You’d think that once you had less to lose, you’d worry about things less, but I’ve discovered that, instead you seem to get more scared of losing the things you’ve got, and by that I don’t mean material things, all the stupid “stuff” you accumulate on your way through a life, but the more important things, the things that an arbitrary act of unkindness, or a rather too virulent bug, can take away from you without a moment’s thought.

That and your hopes and dreams, of course…

I’ve kind of got used to the endless feelings of tiredness that overwhelm me every single day, even though things like a good night’s sleep seem increasingly difficult to find.

And talking of things being difficult to find, where did I put my car keys down…?

Extreme tiredness combined with insomnia… What the hell is that all about…? I’ll be thinking about taking afternoon naps next…

Alongside all that, there has, of late, started to be an increase in those little aches and pains that I used to shrug off but which are now becoming persistent enough for words like “Carpal Tunnel Syndrome” or “Rheumatism” or “Arthritis” to tiptoe softly and terrifyingly across the back of my mind. Last weekend I went to pick up a plate out of the cupboard to put my pending toast onto and got a shooting pain through my wrist that stayed with me, suddenly and painfully, on-and-off for three days.

This, as they say, was not good.

I’ve started to worry far too much about my spine since my mother’s has started to curl up and twist like a broken corkscrew. Do I share enough of that DNA for mine to be destined to go in much the same way? Does my lifestyle of mostly being hunched up over keyboards and steering wheels, or slouching on a couch watching TV mean that mine is going to fuse into much the same shape? Is there anything at all that I can do to avoid this fate…?

Worries, worries… It’s all a constant worry…

And I haven’t even got around to the fact that my stomach no longer seems capable of consuming anything without there being some sort of unfortunate side-effect, or the strange new mole which appeared upon my face only two months ago but now seems to be insisting on becoming a brand new feature of my face. I’ve said nothing about the constant trips to the bathroom when I drink even slightly too much coffee when I arrive at work in the morning, or about my general clumsiness and a lack of co-ordination which, I’ll admit, I’ve probably always had but I’m now becoming increasingly aware of as I break crockery (you should see our chipped crockery collection, courtesy of my washing up...) and fall over the furniture with alarming regularity. Then there are the more subtle things like style choices and not caring about certain things like what I am wearing, my appearance in general, or designer labels, or rinky-dinky new gadgets.

I’ll also admit I think I spend far too much time contemplating my mother’s DNA and finding parallels, even though, deep down, I know that nothing is carved in tablets of stone, none of it is inevitable, and the outcome of a lot of these things is, as yet, undecided, and that in all probability, how any or all of those things turn out is rather down to me and how I act from now on. However, it still bothers me that the easiest route, the path of least resistance, is the one that leads directly to me turning out much like she has and it is, quite frankly, terrifying.

The most worrying development of all is the sense that my eyesight has been getting worse recently. The inability to stare at words on a screen or a page for any length of time, and the fact that I now need to remove my glasses to be able to read anything at all. My father used to say that he considered that, in many ways, his deafness was far worse than blindness because it was a less visible disability and so people just presumed that you were an idiot, but I don’t really think that I could ever agree with him about that. In the end, apart from obvious audible loss of the cricket commentaries, I’m not really interested enough in music to miss it all that much, but reading, artwork, films and TV pretty much sum up all of the things I love to do with my life, and to lose the visual element would be, to me, a loss that I really think that I couldn’t bear.

Sometimes I get these things which I can only really describe as “genetic flashbacks” I find myself curling my lip in a particular way and I am reminded of my grandmother, or I find that I’m trying to read favouring just one eye and I am reminded of my grandfather. I rub my forehead and in my mind’s eye, I can see my father doing exactly the same thing, and I look at my mother as she crumbles these days and so many of the tics she exhibits and those annoying little mannerisms she has, as well as some of the more troubling aspects of her personality and biology are manifesting themselves in me...

The strangest thing of all is how quickly it seems to have come on over the past couple of months, as if someone just flipped a switch and I woke up “old”. But at least I’m still planning on going down with dignity. Not for me this rather sad-looking modern tendency to try and dress ten, twenty or even thirty years younger than really seems appropriate. Oh no! I will continue to mock and pour scorn upon those people who want to dress up just like their children and fall for the farcical flattery of idiots pandering to them and saying patently untrue “you look just like sisters”, God help ’em…

That’s not for me. I’m going down the route of being a “grumpy old git” and nothing’s going to stop me now…!